Sorry that you were downvoted because you were 100% right. Cambridge Analytica is a fake scandal. Cambridge Analytica absolutely broke Facebook's terms of service with its personality quiz scheme but it absolutely did not affect the 2016 election.

I'm an advertiser who has managed hundreds of millions of dollars for small startups and big corporations, brands, as well as a few small political campaigns.

Even at the time of the Trump election, the kind of ad targeting that Cambridge Analytica says they were offering through the personality quizzes was absolute garbage. There is a reason why the official response from Boz doesn't even mention the personality quiz stuff, because it was essentially irrelevant to the Trump campaign's performance on paid advertising on Meta. And I would go further to say that, except for his success in fundraising, all of his Meta advertising probably didn't move that many votes.

Cambridge Analytica, the organization, of course, loves to claim that they're the dark evil viziers behind the Trump campaign and they've advertised themselves as such to dictators all over the world. But that's just like Edward Bernays writing "Propaganda" back in the day, it is a way to sell their services. Trump digital director Brad Parscale said the campaign did not even use Cambridge Analytica’s controversial psychographic targeting.

Not to mention, the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web. After that they cut off that graph access.

We had the same issue with Brexit

It was in CA's interest to have people believe they had some sort of magic algorithm.

And it was on the losing side's interest to believe that they would have won the vote if not interference by magic.

The Information Commissioner Office carried out an extensive investigation and concluded that CA were not involved at all with either of the two leave supporting organisations.

But this fact is simply ignored and undefined campaign by CA still used as the simple excuse for why they lost.